Dustin's Pages

Sunday, October 25, 2009

RMOUG Training Days 2010 Abstracts: Groovy, REST, and Better UIs

As I noted in my previous post, my two abstracts have been accepted by the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) for presentation at Training Days 2010. I have also learned that Bill Jackson's abstract for "Ten Easy Ways To Build a Better GUI" has been accepted as well. I will include the abstracts for my two presentations and for Bill's presentation later in this post.

I am eager to present these two presentations because they are inspired by the presentations that I had planned to present at Colorado Software Summit 2009. Incidentally, that conference would have started tonight with the annual Sunday evening reception famous for its good food and interesting conversation. It was a great way to casually and comfortably kick off an absolutely terrific conference. I was sad to hear about the end of this conference and don't like thinking about what I am missing this week. It certainly would have been nice to be getting my brain crammed full of software development concepts and ideas this week in beautiful Keystone, Colorado. As I stated, however, the opportunity to present presentations at RMOUG Training Days 2010 similar to what I had planned for CSS 2009 is a positive one.

My two abstracts that were accepted for RMOUG Training Days 2010 are "Applied Groovy: Scripting for Java Development" and "RESTful Java." The abstracts for these two presentations are (may differ slightly from what will appear in the conference materials):

Applied Groovy: Scripting for Java Development

As a dynamic language that runs on the JVM and can be used anywhere the Java programming language is used, Groovy is a great choice for building, testing, and maintaining Java SE and EE applications. This presentation briefly summarizes some basics of Groovy and advantages of using Groovy before moving onto demonstrating how to use Groovy to improve the ability to build and test standard and enterprise Java applications. Although the basics of Groovy will be covered initially in the presentation for those who have not used Groovy previously, most of the syntax and other features of Groovy covered in this presentation will be presented in conjunction with use of Groovy in the building and testing of applications for the Java platform.

RESTful Java

The Java platform provides many types of support for building REST-based web services and REST-compliant clients. This presentation will briefly summarize the main principles of the Representational State Transfer style of web services before covering several of the most popular Java-based approaches for working with REST. The presentation will focus on JSR 311 (“JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services”), Jersey (the JSR 311 reference implementation), Restlet, and Enunciate while also covering other useful tools related to REST-oriented development with Java.

Bill Jackson's abstract is called "Ten Easy Ways to Build a Better GUI." His abstract is shown next and, as its name implies, focuses on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs).

10 Easy Ways to Build a Better GUI

In the world of graphic user interfaces, form nearly always follows function. From Dilbert jokes about GUIs designed by engineers to MySpace’s reputation for ugly pages it’s clear that designing attractive, useful, and well thought-out GUIs is much easier said than done.

However, positive examples in the commercial world such as Apple’s well-earned reputation for stylish products show just how much impact a well designed user interface can have. This presentation will cover 10 basic steps for building more intuitive, attractive, and useful user interfaces. The discussion will include issues such as usability, data presentation, form layout, color selection, icon acquisition, and a host of other issues that will help attendees to understand the basic steps to making programs that users actually like. The benefits of these skills go beyond the aesthetic issues to help raise user productivity and product longevity. The presentation will not require any specific programming knowledge and will apply to desktop applications and web pages alike

My presentations planned for RMOUG Training Days 2010 will be changed to some degree because of the different venue and different audience characteristics. The Groovy presentation is conceptually almost exactly what I planned for Colorado Software Summit except that I was going to speak on JRuby there. The RESTful Java presentation will be 60 minutes at RMOUG Training Days 2010 rather than the 90 minutes it would have been at Colorado Software Summit 2009. Because of the shorter duration, it will necessarily be less detailed at Training Days, but I think that may fit the different audience better anyway. I will focus on basics of REST and then cover at a high level (with some API details) how to apply Java tools and frameworks to build REST-based applications.